January 11th, 2025
I feel like this morning I had a bit of breakthrough! As a reminder, I started 2024 with similar goals and aspirations. After a New Year’s yoga session, I joined a local yoga studio and started participating in the 26 and 2 hot yoga series. 26 yoga positions and 2 breathing exercises in a heated room. I started the year strong but this all changed on January 17th, 2024 when I injured my left foot playing tennis with a painful tarsal tunnel syndrome and eventually chronic plantar fasciitis. Despite my best attempts, no amount of yoga was going to heal the tibial nerve damage I had encountered. While I did attend classes throughout the year, it would be hard to say that it became a consistent practice with all the injury breaks I had to take. No being a master of any of the positions, I am quite sure my poor form had exacerbated pain levels as foot issues led to back problems.
Yet before all of this, I have historically been as stiff and inflexible as they come. With all the tennis I was playing, it seemed to just be getting worse. My dear wife would kindly suggest that I need to stand up straighter as I was beginning to mimic a hunchback. But sometimes I just couldn’t straighten my back fully without enduring transitional pain. While I have always loved athletics and considered myself an athlete, I had begun to move like a decrepit old man at times. This included putting on my shoes- which I could only do sitting down. Touching my toes- I don’t think that has ever been a thing since I was 8 years old. Even when I was captain of the Crew team in college, this was a challenge, particularly in the groin, hamstrings, and lower back. In hindsight, I am sure my lack of flexibility held me back in many ways.
So I started yoga in 2024 as a way to offset some of those challenges. I can’t imagine what these instructors saw when I started trying these poses. Credit to them for not just laughing out loud. Today, though, was easily the best yoga class I have ever had. One of the more challenging positions is the Standing Head-to-Knee pose (Dandayamana Janu Sirsasana). Courtesy of www.dimensions.com, this is what the pose looks like:
To be fair that is not what I looked like- far from it.. However, for a brief moment, my left leg was perfectly straight AND my extended right leg was perfectly straight as I stood balancing there. Whoa, I thought- it is happening!
So what does all of this have to do with sugar? Simply put, sugar is an inflammatory food- although drug would be a better description of what it does, in my humble opinion. According to Harvard Medical School, (seemingly a reliable source),
“Consuming too much added sugar can raise blood pressure and increase chronic inflammation, both of which are pathological pathways to heart disease.”
To achieve the looseness and flexibility I desire, I need anti-inflammatory foods. A great example of this is turmeric. My podiatrist prescribed me curcumin turmeric last year before we decided to schedule surgery and while it didn’t fix my foot, it sure as hell fixed my back pain overnight. (Turmeric will get a whole separate post!) For the first time in my life that I could remember, I could wake up and touch my toes. It was such a glorious moment that I went around work and home all day showing people that I could touch my toes like a crazy person! “Look, I can touch my toes!”
However, the real problem is that sugar ultimately offsets and destroys every other positive thing I am doing for my body. It’s like pouring ranch dressing all over your beautiful salad or having a smoke after taking a run or, specifically for me, putting spoonfuls of brown sugar on top of oatmeal. So playing tennis, doing yoga, and taking turmeric, were, at best mitigating the damage I was doing to my body with sugar. And at some point, sugar is going to win. It’s like going to the casino- the odds are not in your favor. Eventually, you will lose your money. Eventually, your health will be destroyed. It’s just so damn hard for some to get over the “Cha-Ching” they experience at the slots or, in my case, the satisfaction that comes with every bite of a glorious oatmeal raisin cookie.